Prepare for a major drop in what was already spread-too-thin enforcement of what are fairly low quality and safety standards relative to the rest of the developed world.
Interesting. In my experience, the US still has one of highest food qualities in the world, especially when you take into account it's diversity and variety. Sure, some things get missed here and there, but it's also a lot easier to be safe and consistent if you aren't producing the types of food the US is.
With poor enforcement, it would be nice if at least I could buy my meat directly from the farmer I know where at least I can see the facilities for myself, but they have made that illegal -- no you must buy it through one of the poorly enforced USDA approved slaughterhouses that I have no personal connection to.
Yeah one of my friends is bashing her head against the wall about this. She’s a small farmer up on the Olympic peninsula where there are no approved slaughterhouses for small farmers to use to process meat, so them selling the meat locally to people around them is illegal. So she is trying to build one for the surrounding area, except all the regulations that exist are for insanely scaled operations and make no sense for a small scale… so she has to keep petitioning the county about different things.
I buy beef in bulk from a rancher, who sends me to get it from a USDA approved slaughterhouse. Which is a small family operation, so I've gotten to know them well too. They raise the most delicious lamb I've ever tasted.
Your comment reminded me of this book called, "everything I want to do is illegal" [1] written by a farmer that talks about his annoyances with the US food system and how regulations favor corporate farming.
We have the Food Freedom Act in Wyoming [1]. It technically requires meat be sold "for future delivery provided that the processing of the animals is done by the purchaser or by a Wyoming or federally licensed processing facility."
But in my experience, ranchers are liberal with how they define me "processing" my meat. (In one case, he pointed out the bits of silver skin he hadn't trimmed. So I "processed" those off at home.)
lol yes what we really need right now is unregulated interstate sales of raw milk. Luckily that was introduced in 2024 (last congress) and went nowhere.
Interesting, where are you running into trouble buying meat from local farmers? I've often visit rural farms that have a store houses. Nearly all of them haver refrigerators and freezers with meat to buy.
That's about as useful and true as "a programmer losing his/her job to AI is always a good thing".
There certainly exist bad regulations and bad bureaucrats, but many (most?) regulations are written in blood, whether it be from employees, customers, or merely innocent bystanders, and there needs to be a group of people who facilitate said regulations.
I'm all for aggressive and continuous re-evaluation of regulations and downsizing bloated bureaucracies, but blanket "all bueeaucrats/regulations are bad" sentiments gets us ineffectual and grifting BS like DOGE, and it creates the very real possibility we'll have to re-learn bloody lessons down the road.
Knee-capping the USDA will almost certainly to lead to some very painful education in the future.
Do you think “have a personal relationship with the farmer, slaughterhouse, and butcher” is a scalable solution? And if you happen to live near a cattle ranch and know your supply chain for beef, how are you going to establish a relationship with the guy selling you fish as well? Will you be making road trips to the coast to talk to some fishermen and ride along on their boats?
The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC. It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. There’s no reason USDA of all agencies should have thousands of employees in DC.
The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC.
Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.
I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.
If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.
For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
The small percentage of USDA employees that are in the DC area are mostly administering policy related things which absolutely make sense to be in that area.
DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.
Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
When the federation was created was the concentration of power in the capital intended? Or was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
> was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
I guess my functional question is why agriculture requires federal regulation to the tune of the USDA. (And I'm asking this genuinely. As a not farmer.)
$189 billion of USDA's $213 billion budget is the Food and Nutrition Service. They're administering SNAP, WIC, school lunch programs, etc. These jobs are policy, distributing money, coordination with state programs, etc.
There's a different answer "why" to each of these programs' origin stories, but in general, they were a response to issues that previously existed and weren't being addressed. e.g. the school lunch program was created because we don't expect children to skip meals at school due to their parents inability to provide for them. And it was done nationally because many states failed to solve the issue themselves.
The entire point of the Constitution was to concentrate more power in the Federal Government because the structure we had under the Articles of Confederation was an unworkable mess.
Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)
80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.
The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA.
Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices.
If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
> If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
The comparison is particularly galling when you consider how many of these DMV white-collar government employees are black.
So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska
I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
> they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.
If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning.
What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed.
However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
> Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
The last thing some legislators and lobbyists who've cooked up a law that will make their benefactors rich at the expense of some other random industry is to have the enforcement bureaucracy in charge of actually doing it pushing back because it's nonsensical.
Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road).
If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).
> bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase
To be fair, it also makes it incredibly difficult to import a truck made for any other market into America.
I think it makes sense to distribute the federal government across the country, rather than centralizing it all in Washington DC. Especially for something like agriculture. What's the downside?
Prepare for a major drop in what was already spread-too-thin enforcement of what are fairly low quality and safety standards relative to the rest of the developed world.
But metal shavings add so much flavour to my meals! It really makes eating an exciting adventure.
> Prepare for a major drop in what was already spread-too-thin enforcement
Genuine question: do we have historical analogs or studies for the costs and benefits of concentrated versus decentralised regulation?
Time to become a GI doctor!
Interesting. In my experience, the US still has one of highest food qualities in the world, especially when you take into account it's diversity and variety. Sure, some things get missed here and there, but it's also a lot easier to be safe and consistent if you aren't producing the types of food the US is.
Listeria? Who's she?
With poor enforcement, it would be nice if at least I could buy my meat directly from the farmer I know where at least I can see the facilities for myself, but they have made that illegal -- no you must buy it through one of the poorly enforced USDA approved slaughterhouses that I have no personal connection to.
Yeah one of my friends is bashing her head against the wall about this. She’s a small farmer up on the Olympic peninsula where there are no approved slaughterhouses for small farmers to use to process meat, so them selling the meat locally to people around them is illegal. So she is trying to build one for the surrounding area, except all the regulations that exist are for insanely scaled operations and make no sense for a small scale… so she has to keep petitioning the county about different things.
I buy beef in bulk from a rancher, who sends me to get it from a USDA approved slaughterhouse. Which is a small family operation, so I've gotten to know them well too. They raise the most delicious lamb I've ever tasted.
Your comment reminded me of this book called, "everything I want to do is illegal" [1] written by a farmer that talks about his annoyances with the US food system and how regulations favor corporate farming.
[1] https://tinyurl.com/hb95amyw
Direct link so you aren’t tracked by tinyurl:
https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/everything-i-want-to...
> they have made that illegal
We have the Food Freedom Act in Wyoming [1]. It technically requires meat be sold "for future delivery provided that the processing of the animals is done by the purchaser or by a Wyoming or federally licensed processing facility."
But in my experience, ranchers are liberal with how they define me "processing" my meat. (In one case, he pointed out the bits of silver skin he hadn't trimmed. So I "processed" those off at home.)
[1] https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2015/HB0056
There is currently a bill in Congress trying to address (some of) that: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/family_grocer...
And also milk: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8374
> And also milk: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8374
lol yes what we really need right now is unregulated interstate sales of raw milk. Luckily that was introduced in 2024 (last congress) and went nowhere.
Interesting, where are you running into trouble buying meat from local farmers? I've often visit rural farms that have a store houses. Nearly all of them haver refrigerators and freezers with meat to buy.
A bureaucrat losing his job is always a good thing.
That's about as useful and true as "a programmer losing his/her job to AI is always a good thing".
There certainly exist bad regulations and bad bureaucrats, but many (most?) regulations are written in blood, whether it be from employees, customers, or merely innocent bystanders, and there needs to be a group of people who facilitate said regulations.
I'm all for aggressive and continuous re-evaluation of regulations and downsizing bloated bureaucracies, but blanket "all bueeaucrats/regulations are bad" sentiments gets us ineffectual and grifting BS like DOGE, and it creates the very real possibility we'll have to re-learn bloody lessons down the road.
Knee-capping the USDA will almost certainly to lead to some very painful education in the future.
That falls a bit flat when the bureaucrat has been replaced by an autocrat, don't you think?
Do you think “have a personal relationship with the farmer, slaughterhouse, and butcher” is a scalable solution? And if you happen to live near a cattle ranch and know your supply chain for beef, how are you going to establish a relationship with the guy selling you fish as well? Will you be making road trips to the coast to talk to some fishermen and ride along on their boats?
The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
Never had any problem buying from local farms. Not sure where that is illegal.
Just grow your own food.
/s
If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC. It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. There’s no reason USDA of all agencies should have thousands of employees in DC.
The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC.
Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.
[1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location
I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.
If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.
For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
The small percentage of USDA employees that are in the DC area are mostly administering policy related things which absolutely make sense to be in that area.
>It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games.
DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.
Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
> If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC
If only we had like fifty sovereign governments spread out across our nation.
When the federation was created was the concentration of power in the capital intended? Or was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
> was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
I guess my functional question is why agriculture requires federal regulation to the tune of the USDA. (And I'm asking this genuinely. As a not farmer.)
$189 billion of USDA's $213 billion budget is the Food and Nutrition Service. They're administering SNAP, WIC, school lunch programs, etc. These jobs are policy, distributing money, coordination with state programs, etc.
There's a different answer "why" to each of these programs' origin stories, but in general, they were a response to issues that previously existed and weren't being addressed. e.g. the school lunch program was created because we don't expect children to skip meals at school due to their parents inability to provide for them. And it was done nationally because many states failed to solve the issue themselves.
The entire point of the Constitution was to concentrate more power in the Federal Government because the structure we had under the Articles of Confederation was an unworkable mess.
Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)
80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.
The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA.
Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices.
If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
> If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
The comparison is particularly galling when you consider how many of these DMV white-collar government employees are black.
Combat veterans as well since they get explicit preference in hiring.
Only if Trump gets his way. https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/b...
So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska
> So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns
and all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible?
> all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible?
Honestly? Probably.
No one is really all that special.
I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
> they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.
If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
> No one is really all that special.
They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning.
What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
You make a good point.
I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed.
However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
> Honestly? Probably
Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
> Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
Apparently they are in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-civil-servic...
The last thing some legislators and lobbyists who've cooked up a law that will make their benefactors rich at the expense of some other random industry is to have the enforcement bureaucracy in charge of actually doing it pushing back because it's nonsensical.
Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road).
If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).
> bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase
To be fair, it also makes it incredibly difficult to import a truck made for any other market into America.
[dead]
As other comments pointed out, the department is very much spread out. It can be confirmed via a simple google search.
Why is such an egregious comment at the top?
You get what you vote for. Enjoy!
I think it makes sense to distribute the federal government across the country, rather than centralizing it all in Washington DC. Especially for something like agriculture. What's the downside?
It already is -- 90%+ of USDA employees are not in the DC area.
More AI layoffs /s